Richard Muller is interviewed in the current issue of Physics World (H/T Jonathan Jones). The article is not online as far as I can tell, but there are some interesting comments that I will reproduce here.

Asked by he started the BEST project, Muller replies:

"I lost my trust," Muller says, referring to the alleged actions of the scientists at the centre of the "Climategate" scandal, which broke in 2009. The controversy centred on a series of e-mails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK that led to accusations about the conduct of these scientists, including the way that data were selected in their studies. Although all the CRU scientists involved have been exonerated by four independent inquiries, Muller, having read the leaked e-mails, is still scathing of these scientistsand he isconvinced that, while they did nothing illegal, they are still guilty of scientific malpractice and that big question marks remain over their scientific methods. "What bothers me is the way that they hid the data, and the way that they used the peer-review system to make sure that the sceptics' arguments - some of which I felt were valid-wouid not be published".

And he also has high praise for Anthony Watts:

Muller also had four specific concerns with the scientific consensus on global warming, which the BEST project was designed to address. The first - and most serious, he says - is the "stations issue", referring to a problem highlighted by controversial US blogger and former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts. In 2007 Watts initiated the Sur/acestatiQns.org project, which reported that 70% of temperature recording stations in the US were inaccurate to a level of 2--5°C. MulIer says that the BEST team has now cleared up this issue by showing that when it comes to specifically measuring change in temperature, the 30% of good stations are not significantly more accurate than the 70% of bad stations. "lf Watts hadn't done his work, we would not have reliable data today. The fact that he did that means he's a hero; he deserves some sort of international prize."

The other concerns are as follows:

The second concern Muller refers to i. the "data selection" employed by the three major groups collecting global temperature data: NASA; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US; and the Met Office's Hadley Centre in the UK. Muller says that the number of stations being used between 1980 and the present day has dropped from 6000 to less than 2000, with no explanation to be found anywhere in the literature. The third issue is that rapid urbanization in the regions surrounding temperature stations might have led to localized temperature increases, or what is known as the "urban heat island" effect. The fourth concern, which Muller calls "data correction", refers to the small adjustments that the climate groups make to temperature readings as a result of changes in instruments and locations. Muller says the records describing why individual corrections have been made are very poor.

Reader Comments (59)

But while Muller has maintained his concern for the potential impacts of global warming, he always had doubts about some of the accepted scientific claims. He believes that too many of his colleagues have put their names to petitions calling for action on climate change without considering the legitimate scientific questions that are still outstanding. "I have a sense that many of my friends look at global warming and say 'this is so scary that we have to abandon the objectivity of science'," he says.

Muller is worried that these colleagues are abandoning their scientific minds and becoming politicians. This, he fears, is discrediting science in the eyes of the American public, resulting in a form of politics less informed by science.

The fourth concern, which Muller calls "data correction", refers to the small adjustments that the climate groups make to temperature readings as a result of changes in instruments and locations. Muller says the records describing why individual corrections have been made are very poor.

And, if I understood correctly, the UEA guardians of the data deleted the original data on the grounds that storage capacity was in short supply.

[although I can't imagine it would have filled all that many 1600 bpi magtapes, which were standard in university computing centres from the 1970's]

Frank - the articles you cite appear to describe the methods used in developing the temperature dataset possibly without justifying adequately the particular reasons why these methods have been proposed for selecting stations.

I am particularly intrigued to find out what promoted the idea of including additional stations into the HADCRUT4 dataset seemingly with the specific intent of reflecting increased warming in the Arctic - provoking the question whether it would have been necessary to include these stations had it not been suspected that the Arctic was subject to higher than average warming?

So it seems it may have been possible that there has been a little too much subjectivity in deciding whether or not to include a greater or lesser number of stations.

What was the objective reason for including more stations into HADCRUT4?

In 2007 Watts initiated the Sur/acestatiQns.org project, which reported that 70% of temperature recording stations in the US were inaccurate to a level of 2--5°C. MulIer says that the BEST team has now cleared up this issue by showing that when it comes to specifically measuring change in temperature, the 30% of good stations are not significantly more accurate than the 70% of bad stations.

So because the 30% good stations were as inaccurate as the 70% bad its all ok ?

This is a good summary of some of the main issues from Richard Muller.Of course, he has criticised hide-the-decline and praised Anthony previously.

Bish, Muller is a scientist, so like me he's probably more interested in the science and in scientific integrity than precisely whether some law has been breached.

Here's what Lawrimore et al say about the decline in the number of stations -"The decline in the number of GHCN‐M stations since the 1970s is due in part to station closures. For example in Russia, the number of reporting stations has decreased by at least 20% since 1990 (P. Groisman, personal communication, 2009). However, the decline primarily reflects the need to strengthen international data exchange efforts to capitalize to the greatest extent possible on the full set of observations ..."As Muller says, this is no explanation, it's waffle.

And here is the "explanation" from Jones et al 2012:"Numbers of stations reduce from a peak in the 1960s, occurring in a series of steps at the end of each decade indicative of the cause being changes in station availability in the WWR volumes."There are fewer stations available because there are fewer stations available.

I like to see them defend what their colleagues in NOAA and GISS have been doing with the raw data for various stations in North America, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Shetland and Siberia. Here are just some links I have noted recently on this disturbing trend to adjust historic temperatures -

GISS - North America - http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/1998changesannotated.gif (is it really true that Mueller thought that GISS was a good dataset?)

analysis at the Air Vent - The New Science of Climate Change, by Pat Frank, 6 May 2011: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/delta-t/

It's interesting that Muller thinks CRU didn't break any laws. I don't think anyone can reasonably doubt that they did now we have seen the CG2 emails.

Hi Bish,I cannot find any info on the breaking of laws shown in CG2. I would be very interested in reading about it. Could you please point me to some links or articles about it?Many thanks in advance!

(and also hi and a big thumbs up to you Anthony! You guys' two blogs are my first and favorite every day. (multiple times per day.)Keep up the good work. Thank you!!

Indirectly, this lead me to an eco website displaying concern about what the emails (and files) displayed.

Until now, I've only seen such sites saying things like "everyone talks like that informally" "the emails were taken out of context" etc.

But here, the blogger says...

"I've noticed some people have been commenting on other blogs (thanks for the links and keep them coming) that it is strange for such an article to appear on an Eco focused website. The actual real strangeness to me perhaps is that no other Eco focused websites seem to be doing the same."

Despite Muller's gushing praise of Anthony Watts, I can understand Watts' ambivalence toward Muller, after Muller rushed to give half-baked 'evidence' on behalf of the 'Best' project to the US Senate after promising Watts, as a condition for using Watts' data from his Climatestations project that the Best project would be staying silent until the science was done. Being aware of the fudging and fiddling that was done in NZ and in Australia by NIWA and the BOM to the official records, I have complete confidence that none of the 'official' climactic datasets approved by the UNIPCC are free of artificially-induced historical cooling to produce the current nonsensical warming trend.

The golden rule when working historic data is to go right back to square one, call up those archive storage boxes and pull those original analog records and handwritten notes and QC them first. It is all too easy to skip that vital stage and go straight to some workstation with those huge digital data sets and play about with their fancy interpretation software creating pretty displays. I once found a whole correlation stratigraphy of thin-bedded coal seams in a deltaic sequence visible only on old faded and yellowed optically recorded paper-folded well logs when the digital computerised versions of the logs disappeared the tell tale coal log spikes completely, because the digital sampling interval was too coarse. Worse still, they had also flipped some of the curves, got some scales wrong and introduced depth errors due to careless transcription work.

It seems to me that the Muller approach is a tad too fast and slick, the Watts approach painstaking and methodical.

I presently trust Watts and Watts alone on this, because he is suspicious like most of us of the potential skullduggery, and over the years I have seen him time after time go right back like a forensic detective to investigate the scene of the 'crime'.

Climate sceptics have criticised official global warming figures on the grounds that many temperature stations are poor quality and that data are tweaked by hand.

Here's the missing Grauniad quote from above :

However, the Berkeley study found that the so-called urban heat island effect, which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas, is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to average land temperature rises. This is because urban regions make up less than 1% of the Earth's land area. And while stations considered "poor" might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend.

"We have looked at these issues in a straightforward, transparent way, and based on that, I would expect legitimate sceptics to feel their issues have been addressed," Muller said.

@ pharos - your last two paragraphs, in my view, are exactly right! Similar forensic work to that of Watts has been carried out in Australia and in NZ and the results so far have shown definite and deliberate chicanery to lower historic temperature records that keep the 'hottest evah!' current years deception in front of the public.

"Russell" quotes Muller to effect that "... legitimate skeptics (will) feel their issues have been addressed."

My "legitimacy" is not for some pusillanimous poseur like Muller to approve. How about, "Legitimate climate researchers --those of common decency, integrity, devoted to their scientific enterprise-- will understand that vetting unwarranted presuppositions at length and in detail is the sole means of exposing the Green Gang's egregiously fraudulent pursuit of grant monies to the exclusion of all else."

Over a full generation from 1988, Muller et al. have been complicit in a gigantic partisan con-game, sabotaging global energy economies on behalf of a totalitarian State religion. Unless and until such creatures well-and-truly "legitimize" themselves, we owe them no respect or even professional courtesy whatever.

That it doesn't seem to disturb you perhaps illustrates the ethical void that some scientists now operate in.

Oh come on. We know Paul better than that. But sorry - perhaps you don't Johanna. This blog after all exists for those like you that are so important on their own eyes that they can drive by, make such an attack on a named person and continue on their way protected by their own pseudonymity. I forgot all about that. Deeply, deeply sorry - and to everyone so brave as you who will doubtless will deeply offended by these words of mine.

On the reservations people have about Muller's words (and I accept the details raised by Montford, Jones and Watts) I return to my current favourite Churchill quote:

The duty of government is first and foremost to be practical. I am for makeshifts and expediency. I would like to make the people who live on this world at the same time as I do better fed and happier generally. If incidentally I benefit posterity - so much the better - but I would not sacrifice my own generation to a principle however high or a truth however great.

This by the way is why I accept the need for pseudonymity on blogs. Nothing should be taken as an attack on that expediency but on the use some people make of it. Same with carrying a gun in the states in which that's legal. Do it but don't be afraid of criticism (and a bit more) if you do it carelessly and kill a few people. (Thanks to Keith Braithwaite for that analogy over ten years ago now.)

The Bish's reference back to David Holland's work seems to me to be the most important, because it implicates an officer of the IPCC in the illegality. Muller hasn't talk about the evils of the IPCC as far as I know. But he is bringing Physics World back to something much truer to science here. I have no problem applauding that and his named critics here. Makeshifts and expediency. But not killing people.

That it doesn't seem to disturb you perhaps illustrates the ethical void that some scientists now operate in.

Oh come on. We know Paul better than that. But sorry - perhaps you don't Johanna. This blog after all exists for those like you that are so important on their own eyes that they can drive by, make such an attack on a named person and continue on their way protected by their own pseudonymity. I forgot all about that. Deeply, deeply sorry - and to everyone so brave as you who will doubtless will deeply offended by these words of mine.Apr 3, 2012 at 5:18 AM | Unregistered CommenterRichard Drake

I am bemused by the notion that because you apparently know Paul Mathews, anyone who doesn't know him (i.e. 6.9999999 billion people on the planet) cannot call him on what he has said. Only his friends and acquaintances should have the temerity to do that.

But Richard, you don't know me - so why do you think you have the right to comment on what I have said in a public forum? I can assure you that my friends would vouch for me, too.

As for anonymity, I would much prefer to use my name. But as doing this would be committing economic suicide in the environment I work in, you'll just have to accept or not my bona fides. Just as I do those of Paul Mathews, who I have never met, but who has publicly said that adhering to FOI laws is neither here nor there in his moral universe.

As you see, I did twig it in the end. British blogs are by no means as bad as the American ones for overloading us with initials and acronyms (the French are pretty good at that as well), but as in this case they can send us off on ridiculous wild goose chases if we don't immediately latch on.

"the so-called urban heat island effect, which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas, is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to average land temperature rises"

Isn't that a straw man? I'm not sure anyone is blaming urbanisation for the overall warming (if such there be) but in its reporting, where artificially raised temperatures are logged as if they were normal.

Even BBC weather forecasters now occasionally mention that the temperatures shown on their maps are urban and that the rural temperatures may be several degrees lower. This is quite a recent departure and probably comes as a surprise to most viewers.

PeterSince they awarded the Nobel Prize to the whole of the IPCC machine, why not award it to the Noble band of skeptics (aka Scientists) including Anthony, M&M, His Grace and everyone else who feels they have played a part.

The Nobel Award should be withdrawn from Big Al & the IPCC and replaced with the Ig Nobel Prize. This should not be taken as a negative step as great works of science have been recognised by the Ig Nobel Prizes. One important and up-to-date (2nd April 2012) example is the reassessment of the role of penguin emissions - a subject I'm sure of great concern to us all:http://www.improbable.com/2012/04/02/reassessment-of-the-role-of-penguin-emissions/

The issue of the drop in temperature stations used from c6000 to less than 2000 (actually it was as low as c1200) was raised with the Muir Russell enquiry in evidence put to it. This decline in numbers was not evident from the first submission of evidence by the CRU, (another case of hide the decline?) though they admitted that it occurred in further evidence.

The Muir Russell panel did not press them, however, on the quality implications of this change. It was pointed out, in evidence, that a change of such significance should have been accompanied by a parallel run over a period of time to validate such a significant change in the dataset. Otherwise how could anyone judge if the comparison of post 1990 data with the pre 1990 data was valid and not subject to error? My recollection is that CRU said that it would be impossible to do this - indeed there were doubts about some of their own earlier stations data.

All the pioneering work to expose this lamentable state of affairs was undertaken by EM Smith, aka chiefio.

johanna: Sorry to cause such offence but how would you expect me to know you? I would have thought that the whole point of your pseudonymity is that you would know and everyone else would know that we don't know your true identity. But maybe I are missing something pretty important here. Feel free to enlighten me.

Paul Matthews (not a speling eror) is for me a bit of a hero. Having seen other people I admire attacked recently by the gorgeous pseudonymous on here recently - Barry Woods, Richard Betts, Andrew Montford and Richard Muller, to give four rather different examples - I continue to dislike the self-righteous tone adopted by those quite happy to try and reduce the reputation of such genuinely brave people while bearing absolutely no price themselves. Sorry to have to lelt you know that your angry reaction didn't increase my respect for whoever it is that is hiding behind your own pseudonym.

Some day this silly station drop-out issue will die... Probably not until they add all the GHCN-D stations to GHCN-M, no matter how many times we show that records with increasing numbers of stations over the last 30 years (GHCN-D, GSOD, etc.) show the same trend as GHCN-M.

Its worth pointing out that Berkeley's results demonstrated that:

1) Global temperature trends using ~40k stations are the same as those of NCDC/GISS/Hadley (who use only GHCN-M).2) Station siting in the U.S. results in little to no mean trend bias.3) UHI appears not to be a significant contributing factor to modern warming.